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Manggha Museum/Feliks Jasieński Biography
Feliks Jasieński was born in 1861 in a wealthy family of land owners. He was not only very intelligent, but also had many artistic and literary talents which he developed by studying and reading. He first met Japanese art as a young man in Paris where he went to complete his education in the 1880's. During that period one of the trends which inspired the European art capital of the time was an interest in, and even an admiration for Japanese art, which began to spread through the West in the late nineteenth century. Jasieński, open to all things new in art, could not resist the craze for Japanese things and he started to visit auctions and antique shops to buy colour ukiyo-e woodcut prints, lacquer ware, bronzes, ceramics, fabrics, paintings, ivory sculptures and militaria. When he had returned to Poland around 1888, he kept purchasing new objects d'art through friends and dealers in Paris, Berlin and Japan. However, he never reached Japan, country of his dreams.
It was during that time that he adopted the pseudonym Manggha, a transliteration of the Japanese word "manga" - the title of Hokusai's series of sketches of which he was a big enthusiast (also a part of our collection).
Jasieński's collection as well as his work as a promoter and a writer devoted to Japanese art played a pioneering role in acquainting Polish art lovers with Japan's cultural past. What's more, the collection became a source of inspiration for some of the major Polish painters and graphic artists in the 1920's.
Jasieński thought about sharing his priceless collection with the Polish people right after his return to Poland from abroad. He realised that idea in 1920 when he bestowed the whole collection on the National Museum in Kraków.
It seems that Jasieński planned his collection to give those who saw it a manifold image of both the art and everyday life of ancient Japan.
During several dozen or so years Jasieński's dreams of creating a separate section for the Japanese art under his name in the National Museum could not come true. In the nine years following the endowment the collection was kept in his flat, and after his death (1929) an insignificant part of the collection was displayed only briefly. During the war one public exhibition in Kraków's Cloth Hall was held (the show was admired by the young Andrzej Wajda). After the war, due to lack of space, the collection was kept in the National Museum's store-rooms; it was only available to scholars and shown at temporary exhibitions in Poland and abroad.
The splendid art collection finally found a suitable setting in the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in the year 1994.
Zofia Alber
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